Totos performing a traditional dance. Picture by Biplab Basak

Jalpaiguri, Dec. 4: Education, for the Totos, is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it offers them the promise of a good life and better living. On the other, the tribe risks losing its dialect to more widely used languages.

Yea-Waa, the Toto dialect, is fast losing out to Bengali, Hindi and Nepali, the medium used in schools.

“Yea-Waa has no script, and so is not taught in schools. It has been handed down from one generation to the other. Today, however, most youths in the village only know snatches of it,” said a dejected Dhaniram Toto, the village elder.

From homework to conversation, everything revolves around Bengali.

“Children find little time to learn their mother tongue because they hardly use it,” Dhaniram rued.

The impact of the new languages, the elder said, is devastating. “Most children go to the three schools in Totopara. Of the 400 students in the two primary schools, around 60 per cent are Totos,” he said.

In the high school, too, the story is no different. Thirty-six of the 42 students hail from the Toto community. For many like Bina Toto, a Class IX student of Totopara high school, the language divide has been too great to bridge.

“Even though we have been taught Bengali, most of us have not been able grasp its nuances. There always exists a certain communication gap between the teachers and the students because they do not know Yea-Waa,” she said. “We have asked the headmaster to recruit a teacher who knows both the languages but to no avail,” she added.

Biren Toto, however, has other problems.

“Yea-Waa is limited to conversation with our parents who know no other tongue. Even when friends sit down for a chat, it is either in Bengali or Hindi, because we have been told that is the only way we can improve proficiency. I feel ashamed because I can barely string a sentence in our dialect,” he said.

Impending doom is staring Yea-Waa in the face, but Saroj Kumar Chisim, the headmaster of Dhanapati Toto Memorial High School, believes that an easy solution will be hard to come by.

“We have been on the lookout for a person who can teach the children Yea-Waa, but sadly have not found anybody as yet. At present we only have one such teacher,” he adds.

“It is very important that the teachers of the primary schools know Yae-Waa well,” said Kalipada Toto, the only Toto teacher. “Children face problems grappling with a completely new language and it helps if the teacher talks in a dialect they know,” he added.

“Many are worried we will die out, but what of our dialect?” Dhaniram says. “What will be the purpose of life if our dialect whioch is our identity precedes our extinction?”